Concerning the Rumored Falling to Earth of 'Time's Arrow'

Abstract

This an important article, and a better alternative to course actually pursued here might well been to simply express our usual envy of, and appreciation for, this latest in list of Overton's regular seismic reports of whatever paradigmatic movements happen to be set off as Organismic Worldviews carry on, tectonically grinding past their perhaps dated Mechanistic counterparts. As it is, we proceed somewhat less generously, both providing certain reasons as to why short-term prospects for organismic views may not be as clear or bright as Overton envisions them and going on to list certain ways in which target article still may not succeed in putting best available face upon such still suspect views. First, then, we should probably begin acknowledging that what to count as our major of disagreement with this target essay tends to be rather more affective than in character and generally turns upon fact that, where Overton somehow manages to find room for new optimism concerning upcoming prospects of organicism, we go on suffering from an altogether darker vision-one that turns his the glass half full and filling into something much more like our own barefooted warning about broken glass on floor. Although you might choose to argue, all this suggests that little more than temperament or, worse still, some burnt child reaction separates his generally sunny views from our altogether more somber ones, these different outlooks do portend, we mean to suggest, such sharply different futures that it may well be worthwhile to try to work out reasons for difference. Before coming to these matters, however, it seems best to begin with some succinct statement of what Overton holds out as his own goals and purposes. By his own, we think overly optimistic, lights, Overton tends to see mechanistic views as having gradually fallen into a state of growing disarray, whereas organicism assumed, contrast, to be in for much happier times. My basic argument, he states, is that machine narrative losing its hold on interpretive plausibility across a wide range of knowledge domains and presumably doing so at same time that revolutionary program of organicism has emerged from its relative dormancy to once again provide us with a new unifying theme. He reports, for example, that geology, paleontology, neurobiology, and evolutionary biology, to name only a few of several disciplines said to be involved, have all been moving away from a mechanical narrative, toward an organic narrative. Although Overton may well be right about all this fin de siecle openness to new beginnings, at least insofar as it applies to disciplines other than our own, all such rumors regarding supposed of or death of mechanistic traditions within psychology proper strike us as having been greatly exaggerated and ought to be taken with a large grain (or dose) of salt(s). Overton is, of course, as much aware as next person that cognitive revolution of late 1950s was initially stalled and then later co-opted by same machine categories as those that defined both earlier 'mindless' behaviorism and philosophical it was initially meant to replace. Still, for reasons that are never made sufficiently clear, he now senses, where we do not, enough new slippage on this otherwise stuck brake to warrant proclaiming that we recently arrived at some new turning point in what, until now, has proved to be a relentlessly stalled paradigm shift. In marked contrast to hopeful signs of change to which Overton responds, our own sampling of contemporary psychological literature and beyond urges an altogether more cautious reading. By such more pessimistic lights, these appear to be, if anything, unusually risky times for anyone still open to accusation of being an unrepentant organismic sympathizer. Out on philosophical fringe, there are, of course, as Overton properly notes, certain bright but otherwise scattered lights. For example, those given off Putman or Searle or Taylor-from whom, it would appear, Overton has taken his own more hopeful bearings-are certainly there to be found. Closer to home, however, in low trench warfare of contemporary psychological research and theory, good times anticipated in target article before us all seem strangely remote and ethereal. Where, for example, within first-ranking psychological journals any real evidence of demise of objectivism to be found? Where sorely tried organicist to find new reasons to take heart? What, in fact, actually seems much closer at hand what Habermas (1989), among others (e.g., Callinicos, 1989), referred to as the new conservatism, a backward-looking view currently being promoted a lot of ground-leveling deconstructionist talk of connectionism, modularity, and post-just about everything in sight-post-Piagetianism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and so forth (Chandler, 1993). Much same would also seem to go for notion of Time' s Arrow, which, because it necessarily about directionality supposedly inherent in certain human events,